Thursday, June 21, 2012

Back on Track...

The site is now back online in its new home with Google Sites, and there were many things I realized as I went through the process of rebuilding it.

One was a refamiliarization with material. With 100 species on the site, and a long hiatus due to academic duties, my memories about some species was... fuzzy... The review was refreshing and even worked kind of like a rediscovery. It was as though I was seeing some of the nereids for the first time, and that will help when I get underway with creating new species again.

Another thing is that Google Sites has a much better sidebar navigation system than the host for the old site. The links on the side can be extended so that all the sites are clickable or collapsed so that only a few are shown. For the sake of saving space, I decided to leave the species off the list, but now it seems that if a species page is viewed that it collapses the whole sidebar, which can be disorienting. I think if I include them in the sidebar it will solve that problem. What do you think?

Another I noticed was a matter of consistency. Just little things here and there, such as formatting from page to page and contradictions in the content of different species. The formatting is a rather easy fix, and for the most part I've already done it, but making sure that all the material agrees with itself will take time. Much of what I noticed was so subtle that it may take some interesting rewriting to iron out.

Finally, I noticed that the website as it is so far only takes up about a third of the storage space available, which means that, even with the full 200 species, there's room for more. I don't think that will get filled with even more species, but I think I could use some of it to include more diagrams and illustrations explaining evolutionary lineages and interesting physiological points. Or I might just save all that for Nereus 2.0... ;)

Any way, so the page is up and running again. Many thanks to all those who gave feedback and input during the process, and keep an eye out for updates in the future!

Both, actually. When I completed the original 100 species of nereozoa I realized that not only did I want to provide some detail for several nereophytes, but I felt like the food webs of some of the biomes were under-represented. So I resolved to include 100 new species in the project: 50 nereophytes and 50 nereozoa.